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Surviving the SOPA Blackout

Tomorrow, January 18th, is SOPA blackout day, and lots of very popular sites are committing to participate in the blackout. How can web companies, such as SEOs, and supporters (like us) maintain workflow in the midst of a major blackout?

We’ve got some tips!

I need to find things mid-blackout!

While some sites will be partially blacked out, a lot of the larger sites will be completely offline in terms of content for maximum effect.

This means that during the blackout folks will have to turn to caches to find information on the blacked out sites.

If Google and the Internet Archives both stay on-line during the blackout you can use them to get cached copies of most sites.

If you’re not sure how you’d still find the information on Google, here’s a short video created by our CEO Dave Davies to help you along.

I want to participate without killing my SEO campaign!

If all your back-links suddenly don’t work, or they all 301 to the same page for a day, how will that effect your rankings?

Major sites get crawls constantly, even 30 mins of downtime could get noticed by crawlers on major sites.

A smaller site that gets crawled once a week would have a very low risk doing a blackout for the daytime hours of the 18th.

Further to that you could also look at user agent detection and sort out people from crawlers, only blacking out the human traffic.

If that seems rather complex there’s two automated solutions already offered:

sopablackout.org is offering a JS you can include that will blackout visitors to the site and then let them click anywhere to continue. Simple putting this code in a main include (like a header or banner) will do the trick:<script type="text/javascript" src="//js.sopablackout.org/sopablackout.js"></script>

Get a SOPA plugin for your WordPress and participate without shutting down your site. It simply invokes the above Javascript on the 18th automagically so that visitors get the message and then they can continue on to the blog.

I’d be a rotten SEO if I suggested you install an external Javascript without also clearly telling folks to REMOVE these when you are done. It might be a bit paranoid, but I live by the better safe than sorry rule. Plus just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to track your visitors.

How’s Chia Bart doing? .. Well I think he’s having a mid-life crisis right now because he looks more like the Hulkster than Bart?

To all my little Bartmaniacs, drink your water, get lots of sunlight, and you will never go wrong!